[0:00] The following is a message from Heritage Foods USA. In the next few weeks, Heritage Foods USA will be offering an interesting variety of amazing products, ranging from top quality seafood to their famous pork cuts. At the end of May, the heritage team will go up to Maine to harvest fresh lobster with sustainable lobster meat. These delicious lobster are a perfect way to kick off the summer season. In the pork compartment, Heritage Foods USA will offer the maple cured smoked boneless heritage ham at an unbeatable price. His offer won't last long, so get them while you can. Place your order today at heritagefoodsusa.com or call 718-389-0985. That's 718-389-0985 to place your order with Andrea or Ashley. And don't forget to sign up for the email list and to check them on Facebook and Twitter to get in on their new products,

[0:49] deals, and offers from Heritage Foods USA.

[1:04] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday on the Heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez is not here today because she is in Brimfield shopping for Antiques. Nastasia, word to the wise. Brimfield was cool before eBay. No insult to the Springfield folks, right? No insult. We're also here in the studio with Chad Solomon and Christy Pope from the, I guess, newly renamed cuffs and buttons. It used to be singular, and now it's plural, it was always plural, and I've always said it wrong. No, it used to be singular. Now it's plural because we're plural people. All right, cool. So, Colin, all of your questions, cooking, and hopefully today, a lot of drink related questions too. 718-497, 2128, that's 718-497-2128 will be here for about the next 45 minutes. So, uh, uh, Chad and Chrissy are an interesting uh, group because they are one of the only like hardcore like world-class like bartender couples that I know. Is that true? Do you know any others? I would say the only other 2 are would be Anastasia, Miller, and Jared Brown. Oh yes, yes. All right. They live somewhere else. Yeah, they jumped their car. overseas. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't count. They don't count. That doesn't count. And also they're like, are they actually, were they like working bartender types? Are they are they just like intelligentsia of drinking? I think intelligentsia, right? At one time, um, before we knew them, both of them had bartended. In fact, Jared worked with Dale, worked as a waiter at the Rainbow Room during lunch service while Dale was there, but bartended at another establishment at that time. And by the way, for those of you not hip to like the recent history of cocktails, we're talking about Dale DeGroff, who, um, kind

[2:41] of, was fair to say, started bringing back good cocktails in the

[2:45] rainbow room in the, when was it, the... late 80s. So like the entire country and probably the world, a cultural wasteland of crappy

[2:55] cocktails. Uh, Dale uh, um, teams up with uh, why is his name? His name popped out of my head. The guy who owned the Rainbow Room started it. Yeah, there you go. Like that? Boom, they're right there with it. basically says, you know, along with Dale, hey, why don't we have real drinks here? And then, and that's the start. And everything has kind of stemmed from that. I mean, it's hard to find. like a real bartender here or abroad, really, that doesn't trace some sort of route back to that moment where Dale was like, let's make some good

[3:25] drinks again. I would say that Dale's important to us as well, simply because he's, Chad, I'll let you tell the story, but that's how we got our name. was through a story that Dale had told us on one of the original meetings that we had with him. He, he,

[3:39] he, uh, recounted the story, uh, the etymology of the name cuffs and buttons, and how it, uh, was an old New Orleans cocktail created in 1873, um, and that bartender over time, he, he named the

[3:53] drink cuffs and buttons at the time because of a competing drink called White Ties and Tails. And, um, in the by the 1880s, there was the International Cotton Exposition held in New Orleans. And with all the international visitors coming into

[4:06] town. He's like, nobody's going to understand this white ties and tails cuffs and buttons saying, so they changed the name of Southern Comfort. Southern Comfort, then went on to become a much bigger brand. In the 20th century, Brown Foreman bought

[4:15] it, and they really dropped, you know, the cups and buttons, and it was just kind of a historical footnote. We loved the name because of the kind of formality and it's a very kind of visual connotation that comes, you know, cuffs and

[4:28] buttons and it worked really well when we were looking to, you know, name a cocktail catering company as we started out. Right. What is now sold to Southern comfort was one of the 1st things I ever got sick on. Oh yeah. surprising. Yeah. Well, actually, this might be interesting before we get into some hardcore questioning and tasting, actually, is did you guys

[4:48] meet like after you were bartending? These guys have worked like all the, like a lot of the great bars here in New York and all over the country. So you have milk and honey, you Pegu, right? Where else? like everywhere. I can't even... Flat iron lounge. Yeah. Flat iron lounge and little branch. Yeah, but it's not. Oh yeah. like, oh, they they worked there for like a day and a half . Like everyone, like, these are like, they started these, they, like, on the opening teams on these places. So this is like not a, this is a no joke. Like, this is a real deal, homie situation. And did you guys meet while you were doing that or beforehand? It was actually kind of a fortuitous circumstances, but I was working at Milk and Honey. I started there in its 2nd year, which was in 2001. And it was, I got hired the Thursday before 9-11. So, yeah, 911 happened and obviously everything below 14th Street was just a stalemate for a period of

[5:39] time. couldn't even get down there. Yeah, exactly. I lived in Chinatown. So it's like I used to have to carry my electric bill with me to get into my house because there was always armed

[5:47] guards and, but, um, so I was working down there. 911 happened. business was slow. I needed a supplementary job. So I had a friend who knew the manager at a place called the

[5:58] Cellar Bar, which is in the Bryant Park hotel. So, um, I went to interview there and uh, that's how I met Chad. He was interviewing on the same day that I was. Yeah, so I walked in. I previously had not bartended ever and had been working in film. And, um, when the, obviously 911 happened, it kind of, they shut down all filming indefinitely because, you know, the resources

[6:22] needed to be diverted due to the the incident. So I jumped behind a bar, met Christie there. And ironically, the person who got me the job at the cellar bar was, uh, he said, oh, there's this bar, the Lower East Cycle, Milk and Honey, and he said something you'd really respond to, and he kind of described it to

[6:38] me, and I'd heard of it, but really didn't necessarily understand what it was. But he's like, you learn how to make really amazing drinks and it's got rules and, you know, you have to have a reservation to get in there. And it didn't really, until you went in there and saw it and did it at the time. It didn't make sense entirely. So Sasha didn't need anybody at that time. So I went to the Bryant Park Hotel, met Christie. S being the person who started... Yeah, Sasha, Sasha Petrosski. And it worked out because Christy and I got hired the same day. We didn't actually know that, but we worked together, I think, for the 1st time a couple of weeks later, and she's like, you know, we're like, what else do you do? She was like, oh, I also work at this bar, Milk and Honey. Yada, yada. And shortly after that, she took me in there for the 1st time. And, you know, it was just kind of a eureka moment. Oh, there's something going on here. These drinks are completely different than anything I've tried. These bartenders are working in a way that I've never seen. are they doing this? And it just the questions just... It was such a juxtaposition having both experiences working at

[7:35] Milk and Honey in a place like Salabar at the same time. Not that solar bar was a bad bar. It was just a totally different style of bar experience, you know, much more common to what people think of, you know, completely not a craft cocktail bar in the sense that

[7:48] milk honey. Yeah, volume oriented. Yeah. High fashion, very flashy crowd, you

[7:54] know. And there begins the journey. I think they actually have a color. I wonder whether hopefully it's a drink question. Whatever the question is, we'll take it, right? Call her, you were on the air. Hey Dave, it's not a drink question. I have a question about cellulose. Okay. I saw that there was a Washington or the Wall Street Journal about how they're adding cellulose could bulk up food and make

[8:14] a creamier. I was wondering what extent can we make food completely from cellulose, like, can we have cellulose, pasta and cellulose bread? I mean, just something that basically gives us all that fiber but doesn't make us fat. They used to do that all the time, and I remember when I was a kid looking at the kind of low calorie bread. I always had a kind of a chub issue growing up. You know, my whole family, like we, we, yo-yo, wait. That's how we work the Arnolds. And, um, I remember looking at the thing and my dad was like, they grind up trees and put them into the bread because the cellulose

[8:43] is not actually the case. They usually probably make it out of cotton, like waste cotton, really, you know, whatever, if they put it in. But you could basically bulk it up up to the point where she don't taste good anymore. You know what I mean? Because you can't digest it because, you know, if you were a cow and you had a whole bunch of stomachs with a bunch of bacteria in it, then you could digest it, right?

[9:00] But you can't. So the limit is just a limit at which it no longer tastes good. They chop up the cellulose very finely, like microcrystal and cellulose, so it can hold water pretty well, but it doesn't provide structure the same way that flour or protein, you know, protein and flour

[9:16] can or even the starch when they're linking together. So, um, the limit is strictly one of like, you know, however much, it's basically just a filler that they're adding. Does that make sense? Yeah, I understand. just wondering what's the max you could put in there before it won't hold together, you know, the gluten, wouldn't. I've never tried it, but I'm sure what they, if I was going to try to make a,

[9:37] like a cellulose bread, what I would do is I would, I would dope it with a bunch of cellulose and then dope it with vital wheat

[9:44] gluten and then, I mean, it would be some, I dont think it would taste good now, mind you. I think it would taste bad. I don't know what the upper limit is. I mean, it's, because this cellulose, I don't know. Probably doesn't have much taste. I don't know what it's going to do on a. I'm not saying it's going to taste bad. My recollection, because I did buy that bread, was that it wasn't as good as the normal bread I was buying, but this is just a recollection now. Just a recollection. You know what I'm saying? Another question, I saw that there was a book that came out called why we're

[10:13] fat, I believe. And basically says that the carbs regulate insulin and therefore regulate the uptake of fat.

[10:21] I was wondering if, uh, you were to go on a low carb diet, what would you, uh, supplant most of your, your diet

[10:27] with? Like, what kind of meals? What kind of like, you know, ethnic dishes that are low carb and you know, you could eat every day. Oh geez. Yeah. Uh, I mean, I, I tend, uh, I tend not to believe any sort of kind

[10:41] of, uh, um, diet, um, any sort of diet thing, especially one that is like, uh, that gives up one nutrient for another because I think that you, you're

[10:51] gonna, a lot of times you're gonna end up not being satisfied. A lot of these diets do work in the short term. But I think, and of course, there are people who are huge advocates of low carbs. There's people who are advocates of low, low fat. I wouldn't recommend it. I would recommend like a moderate consumption of a moderate amount of widely varied diet.

[11:12] Now, that said, I have in the past. I used to do a diet, really unhealthy diet. Don't, everyone out, don't think worse than me here. I went on a diet called Blunch. This is my own diet, blunch, because when you when you when you combine breakfast and lunch and you mean to do it, that's brunch, right?

[11:27] That's a good thing. Brunch is a good thing. You know, we have mimosas or whatever. You guys probably hate mimosas. I like them at brunch, brunch, brunch. Anyway, maybe Bloody Mary, whatever, brunch. Blunch, right, is when you don't do it because it's fun. You do it because you're just grinding through it. So what I would do is I would have one meal a day before dinner, and the 1st time I blunched, it was a bagel with nothing on it, and then I would eat nothing until dinner, and then I would eat a normal dinner with my

[11:53] family because that makes me a social human being. So to me, being social is the most important thing. So I would eat a normal dinner and eat one thing during the day. I lost a lot of muscle mass on, on the, on that, and it was really kind of bad, bad news for me, and I ended up actually having to go to the doctor

[12:07] and like have a bunch of awful procedures done to check to make sure that I didn't have cancer because I was bleeding from unspeakable places.

[12:14] But it did work. The 2nd time that I did, and also you're a raging jerk, when the dinner time comes around, because you're, and you smell like, like, crap, because

[12:24] you're, you're totally ketotic, and you're breathing out, like what smells like, like, fumes of death out of your mouth at the end of the day. The 2nd time I did it because it is effective. It's all about being regimented. I ate only 2 eggs, 2 hard-boiled eggs. I was like, okay, 2 hard boiled eggs. I lost less muscle mass on that one, but I still was a huge jerk. So I would recommend, to be social, if you, if you know, being social is important to you, which it is to me. Like, I'm not recommending going on the blunch diet, but I'm saying be very, very, very regimented. If you want to cut down your car, be extremely regimented during the day. It's very easy to plan out your weekly meals, especially your lunch and your breakfast, be extremely regimented, give yourself no choices. If there's no choices, you won't stray. Then if you stray a little bit at dinner, at least you look like a human being with your family. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I was thinking about getting into I think it's a Middle Eastern breakfast, they call it fool? Yeah, full, like full, like uh, like uh, beans, like uh, like uh, fava beans, full Medemus. Yeah. That stuff is delicious. That'd be something good to supplant the whole day. That is delicious, by the way. And you can get it in a can, so you don't have to work. And even my kids used to eat the heck out of that stuff. Full, you know. Well, you know, beans in the can. Beans in a can are one of the few things in a can that are good. You know what I mean? You've supplemented with your own stuff that, you know, that you had it, but like, you know, I'm no, I'm no hater on canned beans. I mean, I know how to make my own beans. you guys haters on canned beans? We eat them all the time. I'm no hater. I'm no hater. But yes, I mean, I'm sure it's going to be better if you make it from scratch. But if you make a batch at the beginning of the week, let's say, then you can have it. I mean, it's for me, it wouldn't be reasonable to make myself a real breakfast every day.

[14:01] I can't. I can't. You know what I mean? Does this make sense? Is this helpful at all? All right, cool. One last thing. Where's the like a good online site to get used restaurant equipment. I'm not talking about like stoves and things like that, but I mean, like hotel pans and... Use pans and stuff like

[14:20] that. Online, it's tough for small items like that. I mean, eBay obviously is good. Um, and I use it all the time for certain things. The best thing to do if you're in a major city, unfortunately, restaurants and bars go out of business all the time. When they go out of business, they auction off at what happens is usually everyone at the end of the of the business is so pissed off and everyone owes everyone else money.

[14:41] So basically, you steal whatever you want and then you walk out. And so what happens is, is, uh, someone goes in, whoever has the lease, whoever's owed the most money goes in, hires an auctioneer, and you go in there and you can buy everything at like

[14:56] pennies, pennies on a dollar. And so you can buy pans, like hotel pans. You have to buy like 20. You know what I mean? Because it's like, okay, we got a lot of 20 hotel bands. and you're like ¢50 He's like ¢50 you crazy ¢50 a dollar. You like, okay, a dollar, and then you have to buy all 20 for 20 bucks. That's how it works. But those are usually in the back of the paper. They used to be in the back of the Health Wanted in New York Times every Sunday, but I don't know where they are now because my wife has forbidden me from going to... a couple websites that announce those as well. Oh, really? Yeah, they're probably all based on the web now. They used to be in the newspaper back when people read newspapers, but do you guys buy at

[15:29] auction? I used to all the time, but... You know what? My mom just started a business doing that. So I've just recently started doing it. It's a lot of fun. No, yeah, it's it's crazy. It's really weird. It's like fun because you're getting cheap stuff. At the same time, it's depressing. Usually like someone from the restaurant is there with their face in their hands and like, you

[15:47] know, you know, someone like me is like, you know, I'll buy all the liquor from the bar and they're like, do you have your liquor license with you? And you're like, uh... Yeah, it can be depressing. Like buying used bar stools can be a depressing thing. But oh, man. But I've been there many times. Anyway, thank you so much for the call. I think we're actually going to go to our 1st break and we're going to come back and taste some stuff that you guys brought, right? Yep. Cooking issues.

[16:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah We, we, we, we're taking back, yeah. When you wish about a dream. That made my face like this single, yeah. Once you see, your lives are clear. In the sky's so bad, yeah. You should start. Come on, who you are. Shine by the sea. And you can do the baby, but you can do the baby.

[17:21] Chance, I've got interview Shining white for light

[17:31] on you. Yeah, I'm gonna keep your sparking color, oh yeah. Make your mind big and strong, yeah. Oh, and I'm about the sun, yeah. Yeah, it's all like what that just begun. Yeah, yeah. Now I got my heart, no, yeah. What don't you never do is lose again?

[18:21] Welcome back to Cooking Issues, calling all your questions too, 718, 497-2128. 718-497-2128 coming to you today with Chad Solomon and Christy Poe from Cuffs and Buttons here tasting some of their fantabulous stuff. Tell me what we're tasting. By the way, you guys feel like chump suckers for not being able to taste it with us, am I right? Yeah, totally, they should. First up here is a mint chocolate, lactart soda. which is a mouthful, I know. It's a drink that we created for an event that we did a couple of weeks ago for

[18:50] Magnum bars from Europe, European chocolate ice cream bars. And they commissioned us to create 3 drinks for the event that, you know, happened or coincided with a Tribeca Film Festival. Carl Lagerfeld shot 3 short films, inspired by

[19:04] Magnum, with Starlet Rachel Bilson, as kind of his muse. And they screened these shorts at this event, and we provided these cocktails. And this is a cocktail where we actually took your technique of the rapid nitrous

[19:20] infusion and infused cacao nibs into VSOP cognac and Highland Park 12

[19:25] scotch. So Louis Roye, VSO Piconiac, Highland Park 12 Scotch, with Cacao Nibs. And then the streak features lactart, which is extinct acid of milk that's been reborn and acts as a fantastic acid in the

[19:40] drink. Well, especially with the chocolate. It works really nicely with the chocolate, I think. Right. And the wood. Yeah, and one of the reasons that we really wanted to use it is when people come to you with certain flavors they want to work

[19:49] with, for us in this instance, it was like chocolate, vanilla, you know, all those kind of things that are very

[19:55] clowing in a cocktail at times. And this allowed us to make, you know, that rich chocolate feel, you know, kind of creamy

[20:02] feel too, but without getting like clowing and sweet. Overly heavy. And what's interesting about it is it's carbonated for all you who can't taste it. But it's one of the few kind of wooded carbonated drinks that I really like, you know what I mean? Because a lot of times, you know, you get like these kind of these mixes and you carbonate it and it can throw the balance off and like the woods can go all out of proportion. It could be a problem. But here I think it really works. I think these also, because these are foreign woods. You know, you have the Highland Park 12 are J's aged in the sherry casks, and the French oak, obviously, on the VSOP cognac, whereas the, like, bourbons and

[20:40] rice are much more aggressive American oak. Yeah, I don't like them usually carbonated. Right, yeah. I mean, like the worst drink maybe I've ever made. The exception of in college, the worst drink I think I've ever made is carbonated Manhattan.

[20:51] It's a new body. No, so that was that was super cool. It's one of the drinks we did for that event. Next up here, we just did a pretty fun project with... What's that fruit? This is a creme demure. It's Merlay? Crème de mure. So our friend Tony Cigliaro in London. Good man. Worked with Luke Merlay to develop and create cocktails with their line of liqueurs in

[21:15] Europe. I have some stories about him that I can't say on the air. That involve an alligator hat? involve some crazy, crazy business. Luke Merlay came to us and we did the cocktail development here for the states. And so this, in particular, is the creme demure, the blackberry liqueur that we've turned into a phosphate soda. So it's the, as soon as you open it, it's something we carbonated again. Obviously, all those volatiles just come explode into the room with

[21:46] the carbonation. This is gin, uh, Tengaray gin, acid phosphate, creme demure, dash of orange bitters, uh, 4 ounces of water, and then we carbonated

[21:55] it at 50 psi. Nice. So as a phosphate, for those. Yeah, there's another one of these kind of extinct things as being brought back to the fore by a guy named Darcy O'Neill. His websites, the Art of the Drink. He has a book called Fix the Pumps, which is

[22:08] old soda jerk slang for look at the lady with the with the large chest. Yes. Extremely interesting book. bringing some of these old ingredients back. Acid phosphate, the main component of it is phosphoric acid, and it's the acid that's in Coca-Cola and colas. And its characteristic is it's an extremely dry acid. It's actually, if you get it in pure form, which is the way I have it. I dont have the acid phosphate. It's really hard to work with because if you go a little bit too far, you're like, oh, ho, hey, you know what I mean? But it's like, it's very interesting stuff and I think it really works well with this, with this drink. Do you find the same thing that sometimes it's hard to work with? Well, there is a big difference when we carbonated it ourselves versus using like a club soda, like the way it comes off on the

[22:51] palate. So, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I know what you're referring to. I would say this, there's, you know, a quarter ounce of acid phosphate in this and that's the high end. Generally, depending on the drink you get by with as much as a half teaspoon. Right. So and you can get this stuff from the art of the drink, right? Right. It's a mail order from Toronto. And the characteristic of this asset, and it's one of the acids that should

[23:14] see, hopefully a resurgence is it's dry cola-like nature of the acidity. Not the flavor of cola, but that dry cola like acidity. No, the beauty is, you know, as opposed to lemon or lime juice, which have a very imposing

[23:28] flavor on their own, this brings that acidity to the drink, but it's very, it does not impose itself. it allows other, you know, flavors to come through, very clean. Right. And it's the only kind of inorganic acid we use and non-fruit-based acid. It doesn't lend an extra fruit note to the to the drink, which is something that's really, it's kind of it's kind of cool. A very nice drink. What's the name of that again? This is blackberry phosphate. All right. Very simple. We actually did a line for, for, as Chad mentioned, we did this for Malay liqueurs, and we did phosphates for, for every uh, expression of the liqueure brands, and it, they all turned out wonderful. Different based spirits, different balances. Because obviously with the with the fruit liqueurs, they're, you know, being a natural product, they're, depending on how acidic or sweet the fruit is, they adjust

[24:17] the sugar. Oh, wait, we have a color. Before I go to the color, though. I have to say, like, I think, I see whether you guys agree. Like, even if, okay, when you're mixing a drink, a lot of times, obviously you're going to use the real fruit, right? But I think having the acids on board on hand and tasting and playing with them gives you such a sense for what's going on with different fruits and different acids, like studying the acids that you use in

[24:41] a drink, because it's such an important component, I think, is, don't you think it's key to kind of becoming a better mixer? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the more options you have, the more kind of the more your understanding is across the board. Right. And by the way, I'm going to take the call in one second. But phosphoric

[24:59] acid gets a bad rap because if you drink it in very large quantities, it can take calcium. So people say that women shouldn't have too much phosphoric acid because it can reduce bone density. I haven't seen any studies that moderate amounts of phosphoric acid are detrimental. I mean, otherwise everyone who drinks cola would be dead. Well, the other thing about acid phosphate and what makes it more approachable to work with is the fact that it's partially neutralized. It's, you start with 10% phosphoric acid in solution and it's neutralized down to 2% through calcium,

[25:31] magnesium and potassium mineral salt. Yeah, because the phosphate will grip onto the calcium. Jack, do we lose a call or we still have them? Well, hopefully they call back. Maybe they got cut off with their with their cell phones. They got thirsty. They got theirs. They like, oh, all this talk about drinks. Hopefully they, hopefully they call back. went to the fridge. All right, so what's our what's our next beverage? So this next one is a cocktail we're presenting our, we'll be serving at the upcoming MCC Manhattan Cocktail Classic opening

[25:58] gala on Friday night. Which I'm working at too, you know. Oh, sweet. And there's tickets still available. Really? Yeah, their tickets still available. Okay. Not to plug an event that we're all working here, but I didn't go to the party last year. Apparently it was... But I heard it was like the most insane party of like,

[26:14] oh, crazy, the entire New York public library, run amok, craziness, things falling, dwarves. Well, it's a pretty, it's a pretty huge event. 120 different bars, you know, 120 different bars, different cocktails, bartenders serving individual drinks,

[26:28] real glassware, black tie. We overtake the New York public library. The scope of it is pretty big. You know what I'm doing for it? I'm doing the non-alcoholic drinks, so I'm going to, I'm taking five gallon corny kegs. I'm strapping them onto a backpack. I'm filling them with soda water, and I have 2 soda valves, like the squeeze valves, nice beckers. I'm going to be running around like soda cowboy, like spraying soda. It gonna be good. good business I have a little 20 ounce CO2 container that I'm filling with a nitrous soda mix, nitrous CO2 soda mix to keep myself pressurized as I walk

[27:02] around. It should be fun. Hydration, man. Hydration, man. Hydration, man. Yeah, it's the 1st time I've ever done a non-alcoholic. Should be fun. The soda stuff is so fun for non-alcoholic. It's good to visit Dave after like, you know, you go to a booth, then you visit Dave. You go to a booth, then you visit Dave. Exactly. Well, hopefully I can come visit you. Sounds okay, yeah. Well, yeah, it depends how many people I have working with me, whether or not I can, how much, you know, I can walk

[27:27] around. Jack, do ever get those guys back? All right. I'm sorry, caller, that you got disconnected. Please call back. What are we drinking here? So this is a Byzantine julep. It's Laird's bonded Applejack. We are going to be working at the Lairdon Company bar. wish you could smell this. So it's Laird's bonded Apple Brandy, the 100 proof. An excellent product, an American product, one of the great American products, the oldest native distilled spirit. They're coming up on 300 years. Still family owned. So the ninth generation. I love their product, except for they also make some of the worst products in the world. They don't sell them to their own name, but I've seen their little thing. Like, don't they make senators club vodka? Our personal favorite is 5 o'clock vodka. So we love 5 o'clock. In Detroit, they mix it with Faygo, orange soda. And if you have enough of them, they say you're on your way to dance a clock. Oh, man, man. Laird. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry. So, blonded apple brandy. coriander tincture. Uh, mint, uh, a little bit of malic acid, and, um, oh, uh,

[28:35] date date syrup, date um, date molasses and Demerara syrup, mixed together. This will actually be serving this julep style over crushed ice, which so this will be a little bit better. It's a pain in the butt. better diluted. Yeah, like crushed ice? Are they going to get it? they're bringing it in. yeah There's a really deep, deep tasting drink. It has a really kind of like a real big depth of flavor and none of the components really kind of pop out as being over the top.

[29:01] You know what I mean? I think it's very well integrated. And, um, I think maybe it's that maybe the depth is coming from the date. What do you think? Oh, definitely. Yeah. This drink was actually inspired by a trip that we took to Turkey. So we're using some of those kind of, you know, more cool Eastern flavors in there and it does have that total like unique depth to it. We also do a very slow roast on the Moroccan coriander seed and before we put it into, or to make the tincture. And so that has a real depth and roundness to it itself. Coriander's weird. It's so interesting because you can get so many different flavors out of it, depending on how you treat it, whether you toast it, whether you don't, whether you put it in a syrup, whether you do a

[29:41] tincture. Ive done some distillates for it, for I did for Jimmy and I did dissolate for him, and it was a totally different flavor. Like the distillate brought out a lot more of the kind of those kind of high citrusy notes. You know what I mean? And like, uh, the, and not a lot of some of those base notes that you're going to get out of a tincture. coriander is a great, great, great thing. Yeah, it's incredibly versatile. And good in a soda. Yeah, I'm going to do a coriander soda. One of the people I work with, Cliff was like, let's do a coriander soda. I haven't heard of that before. Let's do it. We'll do it, do it. So it's coriander, and we're going to round out the, you know, the mid-palate. If you just do straight coriander on a soda, the mid-palates lacking a little bit. So what we're going to do is we're going to hit it with some malic and citric to bring up the kind of citrusy notes of it, acid. And then we're adding a touch of Thai chili pepper because a little bit of spice brings it to that kind of gingery note. You know what I mean? And makes it more like a soda that you've had, but totally different. You know what I mean? What are we mixing up now? So this is my bike ride's going to suck, by the way. Or be really fun. So another event we've got, we're doing during a Manhattan cocktail classic is we're doing the Kampari presents a spirited fete for the senses, inspired by Padma

[30:55] Lakshmi at the box. It should be a really cool event. It's us. We're doing this cocktail. It's our variation on the Negroni. We're calling it the Marco Polo Negroni inspired. We were all asked to create variations on the Negroni based on Podman's cookbook,

[31:13] tangy tart, hot and sweet. When is this event? on Sunday evening at the box. Um, and so this is basically a very uh, classic, uh, a paratif Negroni, equal parts, uh, beefeater,

[31:24] chinzano vermouth, um, Campari. And then what we've done is we've added tincture of papali long pepper, tincture of mace, tincture of coriander, tincture of cardamom,

[31:33] and very minute quantities. So it's recognizable as a Negroni, but there's definitely get the sense that it's exotic. And then with that piper ream drawn out of the papali long pepper, your lips tingle and it's a

[31:45] very, that's a very floral, you know, pepper. So like an easy way to go on a Negroni variation is to add some form of citrus, but you go on an entire opposite direction, have added kind of base notes and spicy notes to it. More aromatics. Yeah, totally opposite direction. From the way most people would... Because we still wanted to keep it an aromatic cocktail, but we've, you'll, as you taste it here,

[32:04] it's, it is definitely a different animal. And by the way, for those of you out there who are just beginning your drinking careers, right? There are a couple of drinks that you can order at a bar. And no matter who you are with, you are considered a badass or okay. Negroni is one of those things. If you are with any sort of professional. I dont care who they are, how, like, fancy, how anything, if you walk up and you're like, you know what I want now? A Negroni, then you're a badass, and, and if anyone bothers you that you're ordering something that's vaguely pink, depending on how much, whether they get it wrong with the remote, uh, um,

[32:38] Just let them try it. Yeah, yeah, let him try it. And plus everyone else who knows anything will laugh them out of the out of the universe. Negroni is one of like the all-time favorite drinks that people who like drinks like. Is this true? I think so, yeah. It's one of the quintessential apparatives, and I think it's definitely an acquired flavor, but it's one that you're rewarded a lot of

[32:55] loyalty. A taster cocktail. I always tell people when we do trainings and you're working with bartenders who haven't been in the industry very long. They've not had the taste of campari, the ginshin, and the mix of the gin and the sweepermouth. If they taste it, every time they make it, eventually one day they'll crave it. It's like. Yeah, right. The notes from the from the pepper coming out. You know what? What's interesting to me, though, also, is that they marry with the with the Campari flavor. And so the Campari is like, um... The comparing note, it's interesting because it doesn't dominate more than it normally does, but I can kind of pick it out more than it normally does.

[33:34] It's kind of, it's, it's, it focuses it in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing is, oops, by the way, no, jeez. By the way, I'm spilling all over myself now. By the way, Kamari, one of my favorite, one of my favorite products, although I do like Apparol, which they also own now. Yes, also delicious, different thing, but yeah. I mean, you know, different similar. Oh, for sure. Yeah, like, you know, apple, lower alcohol content, different flavor. It's a brighter orange or it's a different orange. So a little bit of spicy ceramatic, like, makes you go back for that next sip. At the garnish. You're trying to figure it out. It's like just enough there to like really pique your imagination and curiosity with what flavors you're getting. So for the garnish, we actually curried some orange juice and then compressed that curried orange juice into the orange. So as you taste that. I'm gonna eat the orange. I ate the whole thing, creme jerk, including the rind. Oh yeah. But I think it came out with some heat. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got some heat on it. But it's a really wonderful curry thing. Oh, and I guess we should we should point out. We were asked to specifically the 4 categories where tangy, tart, hot, tangy tart, hot, and sweet, and we chose hot. So that's why the papali, and that's why the curry. You guys are no strangers to freaking heat on a drink, though. You guys made a drink once, and this is before I knew you. Um,

[34:56] you, I don't know whether both of you or whether just Chad did an event at the SCI with a, um, that was me. Yeah. Yeah. With a hot pepper drink. Put me online behind. I can drink. I can drink anything. The lapitata, the kick, yes. with the chipotle, uh, uh, chipotle infused mezcal. Yeah, that was from hardcore business. We were talking, we were telling somebody about that drink last night, actually. And we're at that event. That was the art of art of the cocktail that Yvonne, Yvonne

[35:24] LeMoyne held there. What's he doing now? I think he's got his I Food Studios. Nice. nice. You know, I haven't seen you in a long time. Hey, Jack, can we go to one more commercial break and take a little bit longer than we normally do because I got some questions I got to get to. Yes, we can. All righty, we're going to commercial break. Call in your last chance to ask questions. 718-497-2128. Cooking issues.

[35:56] Do you remember?

[36:04] Love is changing your mind. Wow, chasing the clouds away. I'm

[36:15] ringing. In the key, that souls, singing. As you dance in the night, remember.

[37:01] On a hand with your mind to see you. Remember How we do love was here to stay. Now it's involved, I'm a love champ. Only

[37:48] This is a public service announcement from Heritage radio network. Every Thursday at 4.30 PM, tune in to Flash Talks Cash, hosted by Joanne Flash Fleming. Flash Talks Cash is a weekly talk show discussing personal and small business money issues.

[38:03] The show examines current topics from the financial tax world and the ways it impacts your wallet. The focus is to help people and small businesses find ways to make money, save money, spend money, and know what to do with your money when you get it. Again, that's every Thursday at 430 PM on the Heritage Radio Network.

[38:28] Hello and welcome back to cooking issues for the final segment today. We're here with Chat Solomon and Christy Pope. They are a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. They are southerners who are I consider to be New Yorkers now, even though they live all over the country, but they they do have both both angles gone, right? You had something you guys were working on now, a combination of cocktail culture and music or? Well, we were just interviewed for

[38:52] a new website called Rocktail Culture, which we just loved. It's great. It is the intersection of cocktails and rock music, which totally speaks to us. I think the guy behind it is David Blutenthal, and he's he works in the music business. We have yet to meet him face to face. had a great conversation with him over the phone. He is a cocktail geek, and also really obviously very passionate about music, and it kind of merged the 2 in a, into a kind of an interesting site where he interviews bands about their drinking habits on the

[39:24] road, and they're interested in cocktails, and then bartenders, you know, vice versa. their music. Nice. All right. So listen, I'm going to tell you this. You have one last chance to call in to ask some cool drinks questions to our amazing drink panel here. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. I am now going to go over in Blitzkrieg Fashion, the email questions that have come in. You guys chime in if you have any anything you want to talk about. Okay, Teddy DeVico. uh, who is uh, team chef teddy.blogspot.com or something like that. That's it. I think Blogspot's the funniest thing in the world, the word block spot. By the way, I'm getting lit up on their drinks there. Hey, David, Nastasia, 1st off, I want to thank you guys for doing the podcast. Hey, thank you for liking it. I listen to it every week and I learn a lot. I have 2 random questions. One, has anyone ever tried making chocolate from coffee beans or coffee from cocoa

[40:13] nibs? Both of them go through very similar processes. I think it would be possible to make such products. Okay, here's the issue. They have different kind of fat levels, right? So coffee has a certain amount of oil in it, and that's the delicious coffee oils that when you when you roast to a very dark stage come out. But in order to make chocolate per se, you need a very high quantity of

[40:33] fat and cocoa butter has a very specific kind of melting

[40:38] profile and it's a much more saturated solid fat than coffee is.

[40:43] So, you could make, you could take coffee powder and reduce it to very, very, very, very fine powder and then grind it over a course of time with cocoa butter and produce something that had the texture of chocolate.

[40:54] If you then ate that product. It might be delicious. I'm not going to take away from the delicious aspect, but you are going to be running to the toilet and shaking like a

[41:03] Chihuahua dog because the caffeine is going to take you for a serious ride. A friend of mine used to be a manager at a coffee shop in New Haven, Connecticut, and he used to take Turkish ground coffees, which is about the finest ground that anyone

[41:16] uses, and dump it on vanilla ice cream and eat it in between his cigarette brakes. And I've never seen a human being who shook faster than

[41:24] that guy. literally like a human blur. So I wouldn't necessarily, you could do it, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend it. And Coco, Nibs, if you treated them like coffee, you roast them to a lower temperature than you do coffee because of the oils and

[41:40] whatnot, and it doesn't quite follow the same roasting profile, there's a lot of fat in there. You could brew a beverage, but there's also the extractables from cocoa are a different kind of percentage than you get out of coffee. So you kind of, if you were doing espresso, which is all I really care about. You would get a different kind of extraction, so I don't know it would work the same, but you could. It's not impossible, but you have to account for the different fat levels and the different solubilities and things

[42:06] they're extracting out of it. Make sense? Makes sense. All right. Two, with dry aging beef, you have to trim off the molded exterior, but if you were to eat that, would it be harmful to

[42:14] you? I'm going to be harmful per se, but it might be gross. I know eating moldy exterior would not be pleasant by itself. Oh, there you go. But I think you would be able to make a super beefy, funky sauce with the trimmings of dryish beef. Typically, the trimmings have a super funky odor and most people like a little bit of funk in their meat, but not like a hardcore amount of funk.

[42:30] So if you get a dry age piece of meat, hardcore. After they trim it for you, when they're going to cut it and sell it to you. If you want to know the super funk, smell that bone, because the

[42:39] bone where the bone is, they don't trim off that little piece of skin on the bone. That's where that funk is. And this is why certain chefs like Adam Perry Lang comes to mind. Don't like to cook dry aged beef in a bag, low tempered, sous vide because that funk then permeates the whole thing. I think a little bit of funk, a good thing. I think a lot of funk and like you might like it and like maybe like a couple other people might like it, but a good

[43:03] 50, 60% of your guests aren't gonna groove on it. What do you think? think that sounds about right. All right. Keep coming with the with the excellent questions, Teddy. All right. We have a question from Alvin Schutz. Hello, he's a longtime listener, first time emailer. Thank you for emailing. Please email more. He also enjoys the blog. Thank. App appreciate it. Okay, we hope we can take some time to talk about barbecue, barbecue. awesome subject, right? Do you know the burn temps for lump charcoal versus briquettes versus propane? And also, Alton Brown says that burning propane produces water vapor that inhibits smoke penetration into meat, but many smokers employ a water pan to moisten the cooking environment. How is this different? Alton Brown, much as I love Alton Brown, he is just straight up wrong on this, right? When you burn propane, it is true that water is produced. However, if you stick your hand into a

[43:54] big box full of a propane fire. It's not going to get cold and clammy. It's going to burn. You know what I mean? Because although water vapor is produced, right, you're also producing a tremendous amount of heat, and in fact, the food itself already has water in it. And as you say, there's a water pan there, right? And specifically, what he's talking about is smoking. If you're smoking, you're not using charcoal. You're using wood, because charcoal doesn't produce the smoke flavor, unless you have fat dripping on it, and then we

[44:22] have the flare ups from the fat that are creating those flavors on the meat. Smoke flavor comes from burning wood. When you burn wood, which is an organic substance that is, their hydrocarbons in it that are burning, you are also producing water. So when you are, even if you don't soak your wood chips, you are producing water, when you're combusting wood to produce smoke, there ain't, there ain't 2 ways about it, that's all there is to it. The only way is if you were to 100% efficiently combust charcoal that was 100% well

[44:49] made. You were basically just producing carbon dioxide because there's not a lot of hydrogen left in it.

[44:54] It's basically turned to carbon. But otherwise, you are producing water when you're burning it. So I don't think it's a huge freaking issue. What is an issue is that in order to get good smoke penetration on your meat, you need to get

[45:05] the surface moisture of your product down to below about 10% moisture, which is why you dry your product out first, you form a pellicle before you're going to smoke it, and it's nice and

[45:16] dry. Now it's going to suck up smoke like the, like the end of the world is coming. But don't worry about propane, right? But the smoky flavors, right? Aren't made from the propane. Smoky flavors are made from the crappy, incomplete combustion of a complicated product, which is wood. And charcoal grilling flavors are made by fat dripping off of your meat and hitting charcoal, flaring up and

[45:44] like, and like, you know, charring your meat that way. That's where those those flavors come from. As for the different temperatures, the different temperatures depend on how much oxygen is available. Um, to it, but the temperatures aren't that radically different between propane, methane and a well fueled charcoal fire. Wood fire, maybe a little bit less because it's incompletely burning and there's moisture in

[46:11] there, whatnot. But here's the kicker, right? The reason why gas grills aren't usually as good as charcoal grills, right? Propane has about 91,000 or 90,000 BTUs per hour of

[46:22] energy, sorry, per pound, right? 91,000 BTUs. So if you burned a pound an hour, you're doing about as well as my deep fryer, which is really, really

[46:31] good, really good. But most gas grills don't burn that much propane. They just don't have enough balls to really do what you want, right? Now, even though charcoal, right, even good hardwood charcoal, um, doesn't have, um, doesn't have uh, that many BTUs per hour. I mean, BTUs per pound compared to propane, much less, in fact. Like on the order of like 10,000 versus like 90,000,

[46:58] right? What you can do with charcoal is dump an entire bag into your

[47:03] Weber at once, fire that sucker up, burn it like within like an

[47:08] hour. You can release all of that energy at once, right? So you get to control this immense release of energy with the charcoal. So you can overwhelm it and produce more energy and get a huge amount of power out of your charcoal just because you can burn it in

[47:23] faster and higher quantities than you do propane. If you had a real propane burner, like, like fed with oxygen, I can melt, you know, I can melt steel with

[47:34] it. You know what I mean? So it's not like I can't get the energy out of it. It's just your gas grill. It's puny in comparison to what you can do with the average charcoal grill, even though the theoretical temperatures, and by the way, like

[47:47] they quote temperatures like 1900 degrees Celsius, that's like for the very hottest part of the flame. That's nowhere near what the temperature is on your meat. What's really important is the heat you're producing on meat. And actually, charcoal is also very good for that too, because once it burns down, it produces a lot of radiant

[48:01] heat and that radiant heat is really good at delivering heat to your meat. So, uh, if you had the world's ballsiest, like, propane burner, you could definitely outdo someone with who was underusing charcoal, but it's hard to beat dumping an entire bag of charcoal on

[48:17] your on your grill for just kind of straight balls. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, heat to your meat. Heat to your meat. all about heat to your meat. Second question was, is it possible to achieve mired reactions in eggs cooked at temperatures between 62 and 67 Celsius, preferably in a wet cooking environment without increasing the

[48:38] pH to unpalatable levels? I don't think so. Uh, typically, um, the mired reactions I get are higher, closer to the boiling point of uh, water. And so I don't think you're going to be able to to get to get those things. This is a different question from Daniel. He also says, weeks ago, we mentioned upcoming MoFad fundraiser. That's Museum of Food and Drink in the Bay Area. He's tried contacting MoFad and has not received a reply. Daniel, stay tuned. We've just hired a full-time person to work on the museum of food and drinks. She's starting up on June 1st and she's going to be taking over that website and she's going to answer your reply. One of her 1st things is to get this fundraiser ready in the Bay Area. Someone will reply to you. Please send another email. We don't want to leave you hanging. Anyone that wants to either go or be involved. We want you there. It's very, uh, to me, personally important that we, um, we try to get this this museum going. Now, before we leave, I was looking up charcoal, right? And a couple things I learned. I read a book on, sorry, I read an article on charcoal that was interesting to me and bizarre. It's called the influence of aromatic components from, and I don't know what, actually, it's not about charcoal, but I found it. I searched these scientific documents, right? The influence of aromatic compounds from pig manure on odor and flavor of cooked chicken meat by

[49:57] L.L. Hansen. So it turns out that these guys were like, hey, listen, because do you guys know this? If you if you grow your chickens over moldy bedding that's really moldy, like you can get a moldy flavor in your

[50:10] meat. So these cuts were like, well, I wonder if the smell of crap also makes its way into the

[50:17] meat. So they literally raised chicken. This said like, this is how horrible. Like our food production has gotten there. Rather than saying, why don't we not have our chicken coops smell so awful that, um,

[50:28] that like we can't stand being anywhere near them? Instead, we're like, well, let's see whether we can really taste the meat. Edward's been stored in these horrible ways. We justify it. Yeah, so they literally, they literally pumped pig crap stink into like these chicken growing coops for a period of time, uh, and then did sci-by-side blind taste tests on the different kinds of

[50:51] meat, whether, uh, whether or not you could tell that they were raised in pig stink.

[50:56] And turns out you can't, but what a horrible. It's a brave new world. Horrible idea. All right, so listen, we're on our way out, but I want you guys to get the final word. What do you what do you got for us? What do you got? anything? What do we got? Nothing. Visit our website. Okay, given the website. We have a new website. It's www, cuffs and buttons.com. C-U-F-S-A-N-D-B-U-T-T-ONS dot com. And my next band will be Pig Stink Chicken, cooking issues.

[51:39] Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage radio network. You can find all of our archived programs on heritageradionetwork.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching

[51:56] heritage radio networks in the iTunes store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening. And now here's some behind the scenes food news with Katie Keefer. On MeetingPlace.com this week. Lisa M. Keefe, one of their principal writers, published the following article about the USDA's

[52:22] child nutrition program. She reports it on Tuesday, the USDA began implementing new rules that are intended to put more locally grown agricultural products on school children's

[52:32] plates. Part of the healthy hunger free kids act of 2010, which was signed by President Obama in December. The rules allow schools and other providers to, quote, give preference to unprocessed, locally grown, and locally raised agricultural

[52:46] products when buying food for the national school lunch, school breakfast, special milk,

[52:51] child, and adult care, fresh fruit and vegetable, and summer food service programs. Quote, this rule is an important milestone that will help ensure that our children have access to fresh produce and other agricultural products.

[53:04] Said agriculture undersecretary Kevin Concannon in a news release. It will also give a much needed boost to local farmers and agricultural producers. This is Katie Kiefer for behind the scenes food news.

[53:24] Did you know we have a beer show? Check out a small clip from Beer Sessions radio. All right, welcome back to Peer Sessions Radio on Heritage Radio Network. I'm Jimmy Carboni from Jimmy's number 43 and I'm here with Ray Dieter from the DVA Boys. Hey, Jim Ray, this is a fun show. We're drinking Belgian beer. We drinking iktagum. Hanging out with the guys from 124 Rabbit Club, and we got Dawn and Wendy from Vanberg and the Wolf. Let's go back a little bit to kind of build your pedigree. So the 2 of your top brands that we love and that you have now, scholar decent Saison

[53:57] Dupont. Tell us how you met those guys, how you started working with them. Well, Saison Department was really... If you want to hear more, head over to heritageradionetwork.com, where new episodes of

[54:08] beer sessions are posted every week in our archive, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast

[54:12] in iTunes.